{"id":3525,"date":"2011-08-08T01:13:26","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T01:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/?p=3525"},"modified":"2011-08-08T01:13:27","modified_gmt":"2011-08-08T01:13:27","slug":"pictures-of-the-earthquake-devastated-city-centre-of-christchurch-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/2011\/08\/08\/pictures-of-the-earthquake-devastated-city-centre-of-christchurch-new-zealand\/","title":{"rendered":"Pictures of the earthquake-devastated city centre of Christchurch, New Zealand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I was lucky enough to be able to spend a few hours in the “Red Zone”, the closed off city centre of Christchurch, New Zealand.\u00a0 The number of unstable buildings means that this area is still too dangerous to reopen, and there remains a great deal of demolition to do.\u00a0 From a distance, this is what the city centre looks like now:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you look very carefully, you can see the lean on the Grand Chancellor hotel (centre right of the image).\u00a0 This building came very close to collapse, and is now being slowly dismantled.\u00a0 From close up the reasons are clear:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are other large buildings that are also profoundly damaged, although often the issues are less clear.\u00a0 These two buildings are both leaning (in both cases towards the road).\u00a0 Note also the deserted streets – it is a very eerie place in which to spend time:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The iconic profoundly damaged building is of course the cathedral.\u00a0 It is hard to see how it can be recovered without an almost complete rebuild\u00a0 – note the huge steel buttress propping up the gable end:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, throughout the city churches performed extremely poorly during the shaking.\u00a0 This is another example just on the edge of the Central Business District:<\/p>\n

<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In some cases it is not immediately obvious why buildings are dangerous.\u00a0 This pile of shipping containers, located to protect road users in case the building behind collapses, appears initially to be superfluous:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

However, when seen from the opposite direction, the reasons are very clear:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Finally, this rather surreal sight of a shattered shop rather summed up the state of the city centre for me.\u00a0 Recovery will take a long time:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Images of the earthquake-damaged city centre of Christchurch, New Zealand<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":3528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[123,23,469,7],"class_list":["post-3525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-city","tag-earthquake","tag-featured","tag-new-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3525\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.agu.org\/landslideblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}